Alice's Adventures Through Evacuation
by blueberet
Summary: ‘London Schoolgirl Alice Liddell is evacuated to the Oxfordshire countryside during the Blitz, a place so different it is a Wonderland...’


**Alice in Wonderland belongs to Lewis Carroll. This purely for fun and no profit is being made.**

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Chapter One

_In which we meet Robert Rabitt and Alice goes falls down a hole._

Alice was getting very tired of the indoors. The attic room was dark and had fussy floral wallpaper that she found most distasteful. The ceiling was low and, as is common in old houses, had heavy wooden beams. Alice was just beginning to remember to duck when she came in. It had taken several nasty bumps for her to learn this.

This room was so different from her London room. When she looked out of the window she saw fields and not roads. The sky was clear and blue and not dark and smoky. The fear hung less over the country, she liked that. You could breathe out here.

The woman that had taken her in was called Edith, but Alice had to refer to her as Ms Liddell. She was a confirmed spinster who kept her greying hair scraped back so harshly that it pulled all her wrinkles out. She hadn't looked best pleased when the wardens had brought all the evacuees to the parish hall and made her pick one. Up and down the line she had gone;

'Too fat, too dirty, too thin, too freckled, too small, to pale...'

Alice had been chosen because she looked relatively clean and healthy in Ms Liddell's eyes. She had been fed a boiled egg for lunch and then sent to her new room to 'acclimatise'

And now she was bored.

Sighing Alice pulled the stool from the dressing table up to the window and leaned her bony elbows on the flat wooden sill. There was a river near the end of Ms Liddell's enormous garden, which seemed to Alice to be the size of Hyde Park, and as her eyes followed this river they came to rest on the neighbour.

He was a short, stout little man with fluffy white hair on the top of his head that ran down into sideburns. He was wearing a waistcoat and he was digging a very large hole. Alice wondered what he was going to put down there.

'Maybe he has a rabbit problem,' she thought, 'they may have very large rabbits in the country.'

Alice was a naturally curious child and she decided to go down and help the man with his hole. He certainly seemed to be struggling with the heavy spade, he had to keep pausing for breath and dabbing his forehead with a white handkerchief. She let herself out of the back door and walked to the end of the garden, just before the river, which was fast flowing and looked cold. There wasn't any gate to next door. Alice didn't want to climb over the fence in case he mistook her for a thief, but she so wanted to get into his garden! She went back to the door and went all the way along the fence again, just in case she had missed it and there, hidden behind a bush was a small hole in the fence. Alice was thankful she hadn't had the cake Ms Liddell had offered her, as it was a very small hole indeed.

Kneeling in the grass, not caring if she muddied her knees she worked her head and shoulders through the gap. The man gasped for breath and put down his spade, then he pulled an ornate pocket watch from his waistcoat. This seemed an odd thing to carry around while digging, Alice thought, as she pulled her legs through. When her whole body was on the other side of the fence she pulled herself to her feet and brushed the mud from her skirt. The man had begun to dig again.

'Excuse me,' she said timidly. He turned around and she saw that his eyes were pink rimmed and watery and he had a pleasant twitchy nose.

'Well hello my dear,' he said in a breathy voice, 'and who might you be?'

'My name's Alice and I am from London, but I'm up here because of the war. I'm staying with Ms Liddell but it was lonely in my room so I thought I'd come help you with your rabbit hole.'

He looked puzzled, 'my what?'

'Your rabbit hole, ' Alice said, gesturing to the large earthy pit, ' aren't you trying to dig down and catch them?'

He laughed, but not in that patronising, fake amused way that grown-ups often laughed at Alice's ideas, it was a nice laugh and Alice decided she liked it.

'No, no my dear, I'm not digging for rabbits, although Robert Rabbitt is the name! I'm building the Anderson Shelter.'

'The what?' asked Alice.

He pointed to several large sheets of iron leaning on the shed, 'it's a big tin shelter so that if the Jerries bomb the house I can hide in it and be safe. Everyone will have one of these by the end of the week. Say, would you care to help me Miss Alice? It'd get the job done twice as fast.'

Would she! Alice nodded enthusiastically. He smiled and told her, 'I'm just about to start putting the shelter together, would you please run and get me a hammer from the shed?'

Alice ran off to the shed and opened the door. The latch was heavy and the hinges creaked. Inside the air was thick with dust, she got the feeling Mr Rabbitt didn't do very much building. She climbed over a broken bicycle with flat tyres and stepped over boxes of seeds and tools. 'He could do with a wife to keep this place tidy,' Alice said to herself. In one of the boxes there was a faded photograph of a woman with large smiling eyes who was holding a young curly haired girl clutching a rag-doll. 'Maybe this is his wife,' Alice mused, 'I wonder what the picture is doing out here?' She turned the photograph over to see if it was dated, 1911, the little girl would be all grown up now. Alice put the photograph on the small window-sill, because she thought it was unfair to have such a nice woman shut up in a box.

At the end of the shed there was a workbench that had tools hung above it. Alice had to climb onto the workbench to reach the tools and when she had got onto it she just happened to glance to the floor, she felt a little faint. 'I don't think I'd care to be very tall,' she said sternly. Looking up Alice saw a saw, a chisel and...there was a gap where the hammer should be. Maybe it had dropped to the floor. Alice slid carefully off her perch, sunk to her knees and crawled around the workbench, her skirt collecting dust, in the corner of the shed she saw a hole where the panels had broken, it was just big enough for her to crawl through and there, on the river's muddy bank was the hammer.

Alice stuck her torso through the hole and reached out for the hammer, she couldn't quite reach it even when she streeeeeeeetched so far it felt like her arms would fall off. She wiggled a little more of her body through the hole, muddying her cardigan, and reached out once more. Still no luck. Alice pulled most of her legs out of the hole and stretched, 'just a little further,' she muttered to herself, as she felt the bank curve downwards beneath her. The river did look very cold indeed.

Alice stretched like she had never stretched before and just as her fingers closed around the hammer she suddenly felt like she was falling, no, rolling. Before she knew what was happening she had turned head over heels and plunged straight into the icy river...


End file.
